If all you do in your tech career is:

1. When something is slow, you look carefully at the output of a profiler or a query plan & make measured suggestions about what to improve;

2. When something breaks badly, you gently but insistently ask what & why until you truly know, then the next time similar work is needed you bring up how to avoid doing what broke last time; and

3. When someone lacks info, you make them feel good for learning instead of bad for not knowing;

You will do good work.

Much of the ‘don’t use AI’ discourse doesn’t fully account for the fact that the web has, at this point, largely been ruined by AI slop and, before it, SEO spam.

For example, I’m building a shed with concrete block foundations on gravel pads. Some of the blocks are hollow. Should I fill them with concrete?

Any search for this just produces reams and reams of slop and spam, with advice ranging from ‘absolutely yes and you will die if you don’t because they will not be strong enough and fall apart’ to ‘no that’s a terrible idea they’ll fall apart in winter if you don’t leave them hollow’. Or both in the same ‘article’.

I don’t think the web used to be like this.

Claude gives a nuanced answer that *sounds* true (it’ll make them a bit stronger, but they don’t need to be stronger).

Basically any search for technical advice is similar. The only sources left that give advice from humans are YouTube (and similarly but less good, TikTok etc), the few still-standing web forums, and Reddit. Or books.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@pxlnv/116372944243924470

1) It took me 5 years to build a viable business, and I didn’t spend those 5 years furiously coding. Speed was never the problem.

2) Discussions of AI need to carefully and purposely distinguish professional from personal uses. Too often the distinction is ignored or conflated. I can see the appeal of AI for private projects and for non-coders. But I think that AI is a self-destructive disaster for professional programming (and professional writing of any kind).

“It’s honestly been eye opening (in a bad way) to see how special interests work in our system” says the Head of Politics at Kalshi, which pays Donald Trump Jr. to sit on its advisory board and has spent over a million in lobbying over the past ~year. The government has just filed a lawsuit to intervene to protect Kalshi from several state regulators.

#Kalshi

The idea that AI makes middle managers obsolete because information can more easily flow between workers and upper management implies career development and coaching can happen without managers.

I’d love to see Jack pull that off.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-all-6000-employees-reporting-ceo-middle-managers-2026-4